Leading US media organizations have made a new move in their copyright lawsuit against artificial intelligence company OpenAI. The group, which includes The New York Times (NYT) and Daily News, asked a federal court to impose sanctions, alleging that the company hid evidence and made misleading statements.
According to a petition filed in Manhattan federal court on Thursday, it is claimed that OpenAI did not share critical data sets and chat logs that could show how ChatGPT uses copyrighted news content. Plaintiffs stated that the company abused the evidence collection process and that this could distort evidence.
New York Daily News attorney Steven Lieberman said that OpenAI has been making misleading statements for two years about its ability to search for copyrighted content in AI training data sets. Lieberman said, “This request asks the court to punish OpenAI for hiding and destroying evidence showing how ChatGPT was trained on stolen journalism.”
OpenAI spokesperson Drew Pusateri denied the allegations in a statement to Reuters. Pusateri said, “As the Times’ case weakens and they have been forced to drop some of their claims against us, they continue their efforts to violate the privacy of people who have nothing to do with this lawsuit.”
The NYT filed the copyright lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft in late 2023. The lawsuit came after ChatGPT sparked a commercial AI boom. Google’s introduction of AI-generated summaries in search results in 2024 further reduced news sites’ click-through revenue. Other news organizations later joined the NYT.
The Times has already spent more than $28 million on its legal battle against AI companies. These costs also include another lawsuit the newspaper filed against AI company Perplexity last year. After the Associated Press signed a licensing agreement with OpenAI in 2023, many media organizations began striking similar deals, charging AI companies for using their news archives for training purposes.
